Students in South Burlington High School's Big Picture program under the Vermont public high school choice program. / MOLLY WALSH/FREE PRESS

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Ella Downey, 16, of Hinesburg attends South Burlington High School's Big Picture program under the Vermont public high school choice program. Supporters of choice worry modifications to the law will make it more difficult for students such as Downey to choose high schools outside their home districts. / MOLLY WALSH/FREE PRESS

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Under a new law, Vermont students may apply to any of the 61 public high schools in the state, regardless of where they live.

In theory, that’s a significant expansion of school choice. But in practice, the fine print of the law could translate to less student mobility in Chittenden County than under Vermont’s 12-year-old regional school choice law, critics say.

A new provision says funding does not have to follow the student from the home district to the new one and dissolves the portable funding agreements that many local schools negotiated under the old rules.

That worries school administrators such as South Burlington High School Principal Patrick Burke.

His school has one of the most active choice programs in the state, with 38 choice students from other districts attending this year and a total of 148 since 2002.

Next year the school will accept only one new student under public school choice because of funding rules under Act 129, Burke said.

“I’ve been pretty strident in my opposition to the fact that Act 129 doesn’t include a funding mechanism,” said Burke. “Because I think you’re really just asking schools, how many kids do you want to take for free. Nobody in my position is going to have a very big number there, I would think.”

The new rules do not affect another popular form of choice in Vermont known as tuitioning. Under this voucher program dating to the 1800s, Vermont students who live in a town with no public secondary school can choose to attend any public or private non-religious school on the public dime. South Burlington High School has many tuitioning students and will not turn away new tuitioning students next year.

Vermont’s policies and programs on choice are something of a muddle. The Legislature shines a red light when it comes to charter schools, which are allowed in most of the United States but not here. On the other hand, Vermont allows tuitioning students to use public funding to attend out-of-state private boarding schools — a big green light.

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Yellow light might be the best way to describe the Legislature’s largely cautious decisions when it comes to proposals that would expand choice in towns that have public schools.

Revenue concerns

A high school public choice law passed in 2000 opened the door slightly for students to transfer to neighboring public schools, but sometimes only to one school. Both the old law and the new one allow schools to restrict participation.

The new rules allow schools to limit the number of students who transfer out annually to 10 students or five percent of resident enrolled students, whichever is lower. Schools can also limit traffic in.

Existing choice students are guaranteed slots at their schools until they graduate. The new provisions do not change that.

In Chittenden County, which has seven public high schools, South Burlington opened the door more widely to choice than many other schools under the old choice law.

This helped translate to public school choice revenue of about $350,000 annually for the suburban high school. Under the new rules, that revenue will disappear for new sign-ups.

South Burlington also is bracing for the loss of funding for old-sign ups — who were accepted from partner schools under pacts that called for funding to follow the student. Under the new law, those partnerships are void at the end of the school year.

Essex High School, which sends four students to South Burlington now under a choice agreement and pays the bill, won’t be sending money with those same students next year if they return.

It wouldn’t make sense, according to Chittenden Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Michael Deweese.

“It is inappropriate for my school district to pay another school district for our resident students attending (there) while not similarly enjoying revenues for incoming students (from wherever). We would then in effect end up paying for our kids who are outmigrating while simultaneously subsidizing the education of others’ students who are migrating in to my school,” he wrote in an email. “This is what must be fixed in legislation.”

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Reasons students change schools

Many parents are just learning about the changes.

It would be a shame if the new law squeezes out options for families who find that their district high school is not the right fit for their children, said Patty Downey of Hinesburg, whose 16-year-old daughter Ella Downey attends South Burlington High under public school choice.

“Short of private school, what are people going to do in a situation that’s not working for their child?” Downey asked.

Ella Downey transferred to South Burlington’s Big Picture program this school year from Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg. The personalized learning approach at Big Picture — with internships, presentations and independent study — suits her, the teen said.

She made the change after struggling for two years at CVU.

“I never really excelled there,” Ella Downey said. “I mean, I didn’t get very good grades and I didn’t feel like my grades were showing how smart I actually was. ... I wasn’t getting enough out of the classes. They were really big and long and I just wasn’t motivated with what I was learning.”

Ella’s parents worried as they watched their daughter grow so unhappy at CVU that she did not want to go to school at all. “She was like a little fish in a big pond,” said Patty Downey. “She was kind of lost. It’s a big school, she wasn’t finding her niche.”

Ella’s parents — her mother works in the plants and flowers section at Healthy Living grocery store, and her father runs a cabinet business — were apprehensive about the switch to a new school and a less traditional program.

But it’s turned out well, Patty Downey said.

“She’s completely enthusiastic about school, she has opened up. I really don’t think it ever would have happened at CVU for her. It really saved this kid’s outlook on learning and looking ahead to going to college and what the possibilities are. She never would have gotten that.”

Other parents are also watching the choice law modifications carefully.

Burlington father of four Peter Young said public high school choice is a natural extension of the other choices families have — to send their child to a technical center, or if they are Burlington residents, to choose one of the city’s public magnet elementary schools.

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Two of his children have attended South Burlington High School under the choice program. One graduated and is now in college. The other, 14-year-old Toby Young, is a freshman.

“It’s been a great experience for him,” Peter Young said. “It’s been very good and we’re very happy that he has that opportunity.”

There isn’t any particular program that attracted the Youngs to South Burlington High School, but rather the overall offerings and quality of the faculty, he said. Young is an attorney and his wife is a nurse. They would both be sorry to see public school choices shrink, he said.

“We would be very disappointed if the changes in the funding mechanism meant that this program had to end. It’s not a large number of individual students who participate among the Chittenden County schools to my knowledge, but it seems an important piece of the choices that we give families and parents.”

Tweaking the law

Supporters of the new choice law, including Vermont Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca, say it provides meaningful new options. The old law required schools to enter into partnerships with only one other school, so in many parts of Vermont student choice extended just that far.

Now the choice is theoretically much larger. “It now includes every high school,” Vilaseca said.

The limits on participation and current funding structure were built in to offer some protection to small schools that might have to slash programming if a significant percentage of students left.

“That’s one of the concerns that I think folks have about the money following the student,” Vilaseca said.

His administration is forwarding a number of possible funding tweaks to legislators. Vilaseca declined to take a position on whether a change is needed, other than to say that if public school choice is going to expand, funding changes will be necessary.

Any proposed expansion of choice is likely to trigger scrutiny, and possibly resistance, from the union that represents most of Vermont’s public school teachers.

One of the fundamental issues with many of the expanded public school choice schemes is that they don’t realistically address what happens when students move from one school district to another, she said in an email. “Our local districts set their own budgets, their own tax rates and their own staffing levels. If students from one community leave — and their share of the school budget leaves with them — taxpayers in the community are then footing the bill. In other words, they are subsidizing the receiving school district. It has the potential to rob communities of resources that are raised locally.”

Transportation is also a problem. In our rural state, the ability of students to attend schools far from their homes is hampered by geography, Allen pointed out. “None of the proposals out there directly address how students will be transported or who will pay for that transportation.”

Under Act 129, students must apply by March 1 if they want to exercise choice for the 2013-2014 school year. Applications should be available at middle and high school guidance offices in the student’s home district. Students must receive an answer in writing by April 1. Students must provide their own transportation, as they did under the old law.

School boards have considerable leeway in determining how many students may come or go. They are required each year to set the numbers and announce them publicly by Feb. 1.

An early look at the caps that local school boards are setting suggests schools will continue to experiment with choice, but only on a limited basis.

In the coming year, Essex High School will allow 10 students to transfer out and 20 to come in; Milton High School will allow 15 students out and 15 in; and Burlington will allow 10 students out and 10 in. Champlain Valley Union High School will allow 10 out and 10 in.

Winooski will allow 28 students total at any one time to exercise school choice and will accept 15 students.

In South Burlington, Burke has been lobbying legislators for changes. The short-term issue is how South Burlington will fill the budget hole for lost choice revenue next year. But the larger issue is whether schools can grow specialized programs that state education leaders often tout as a good thing, he said.

Without a broader pool of students, it might be difficult to build programs such as Big Picture, which attracts many choice students and tuition students, Burke said.